The US and Russia have agreed to hold a meeting between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on Friday 15 August, to discuss how to end the war in Ukraine. Trump announced the meeting a week beforehand – the same day as his deadline for Russia to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine or face more US sanctions.
The meeting will be in Anchorage, the White House confirmed on Tuesday. The pair will be hosted at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, the largest military installation in Alaska.
Trump has been pushing hard – without much success – to end the war in Ukraine. As a presidential candidate, he pledged that he could end the war within 24 hours of taking office. He has also repeatedly argued that the war “never would have happened” if he had been president at the time of Russia’s invasion in 2022.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is not expected to attend. Trump said on Monday: “I would say he could go, but he’s been to a lot of meetings.”
Trump did, however, say that Zelensky would be the first person he would call afterwards. A White House official later said that Trump and Zelensky would meet virtually on Wednesday, ahead of the US president’s summit with Putin. The Zelensky meeting will be joined by several European leaders.
Putin had requested that Zelensky be excluded, although the White House has previously said that Trump was willing to hold a trilateral in which all three leaders were present. Zelensky has said any agreements without input from Ukraine would amount to “dead decisions”.
While both Russia and Ukraine have long said that they want the war to end, both countries want things that the other harshly opposes. Trump said on Monday he was “going to try to get some of that [Russian-occupied] territory back for Ukraine”. But he also warned that there might have to be “some swapping, changes in land”.
Ukraine, however, has been adamant that it will not accept Russian control of regions that Moscow has seized, including Crimea. Zelensky pushed back this week against any idea of “swapping” territories. “We will not reward Russia for what it has perpetrated,” the Ukrainian president said.
Meanwhile, Putin has not budged from his territorial demands, Ukraine’s neutrality and the future size of its army. Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in part, over Putin’s belief the Western defensive alliance, Nato, was using the neighbouring country to gain a foothold to bring its troops closer to Russia’s borders.
The Trump administration has been attempting to sway European leaders on a ceasefire deal that would hand over swathes of Ukrainian territory to Russia, the BBC’s US partner CBS News has reported. The agreement would allow Russia to keep control of the Crimean peninsula, and take the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which is made up of Donetsk and Luhansk, according to sources familiar with the talks.
Russia illegally occupied Crimea in 2014 and its forces control the majority of the Donbas region. Under the deal, Russia would have to give up the Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, where it currently has some military control.
Speaking to Fox News, US Vice-President JD Vance said any future deal was “not going to make anybody super happy”. “You’ve got to make peace here… you can’t finger point,” he said. “The way to peace is to have a decisive leader to sit down and force people to come together.”
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